Startup aims to revolutionize printable electronics

Voltera

David Bebee,Record staff

Voltera Inc. co-founders Jesus Zozaya (second from left) and Alroy Almeida (right) hold circuit boards produced by a printer the company developed. With them are Katarina Ilic (left), head of research and development, and co-founder James Pickard.

KITCHENER — A startup founded by fresh-faced university grads is poised to make a big impact in the rapidly emerging field of printable electronics.

A small machine sits at the end of a long table where Alroy Almeida, Jesus Zozaya, James Pickard and Katarina Ilic work to perfect the device that will print circuit boards within minutes using special inks that conduct electricity.

Similar to a 3D printer, it can already produce working circuit boards — or the spinal chord of any electronic device that transmits commands in tiny pulses of electricity along trace amounts of special ink.

"Initially when we were telling people about it, they said it was going to revolutionize electronics," Almeida said.

Almeida, Zozaya and Pickard went through the University of Waterloo's mechatronics program, graduating last April and immediately going to work full-time on their startup — Voltera Inc.

They won funding and a place in the VeloCity Garage — a startup incubator in the Communitech Hub in downtown Kitchener that provides free space, workshops, networking opportunities and mentoring for UW grads.

The little machine at the end of their work table has the potential to create prototypes of circuit boards far faster and for much less money. Every new electronic device or new generation of existing devices requires new and different circuit boards.

When Almeida, Zozaya and Pickard went on co-op work placements while completing their degrees, they all encountered the same problem — waiting weeks for new circuit board prototypes.

"We kept running into the problem of not being able to prototype electronics fast enough or cheaply enough," Almeida said.

Zozaya added that "if you are a hardware company and you want to develop circuit boards or develop your own electronics, the bottleneck right now is in the board itself."

In the fast-moving world of technology, waiting weeks for a new circuit board prototype is an enormous source of frustration. Voltera is working on a printer that will produce one in 30 minutes from the desktop using industry-standard software for the design.

"We are a tool to help designers iterate faster, get to market faster, and that's the real benefit," Almeida said. "The costs that they save are substantial."

Traditionally, circuit boards are made on a material known as FR-4, which looks like an opaque piece of white plastic. That white material is called the substrate and it is coated with copper.

It is then covered with a special mask or stencil that covers the copper the developers want to keep in place to transmit electricity. The copper not needed for the circuit board is removed with toxic chemicals.

This is a slow process, involving many steps, that uses toxic chemicals and produces waste that must be disposed of properly.

The founders of Voltera looked to one of the hottest items in tech hardware today for inspiration — 3D printers. In a few weeks, the trio built something similar — only smaller and one that uses ink, not plastic.

Commercial 3D printers have a spool of plastic that feeds into a nozzle that melts the material. The nozzle moves around and layers the hot plastic into an object. All manner of items are being created by 3D printers, including handguns, bowties and shoes.

After building their own, desktop-sized printer, the Voltera founders ran into major challenges. The ink had to be really, really good at moving tiny amounts of electricity between the circuits on the board.

Enter Katarina Ilic — a graduate of UW's nanotechnology engineering program. Ilic is working with suppliers for just the right ink that is largely comprised of infinitesimally small pieces of precious metal.

"The ink is pretty much made of silver-nano particles, so really, really tiny silver particles," Ilic said.

The printer Voltera is developing lays down tiny lines of ink that are only a few microns thick. You can see the lines, but not really feel them with your fingers. Then the prototype is heated up, and the tiny pieces of silver fuse together.

"So you have pure silver at the end of the day on the substrate, which has the highest conductivity of any metal," Ilic said.

Ilic describes nanotechnology as a fancy name for a material science that manipulates the molecular structure of something — such as the silver particles in the special inks — to change the properties to suit the developers; in this case, an ink that turns into a nearly pure, impossibly thin line of silver.

The Voltera printer not only will help designers working on new products, but advance the quickly growing field of printable electronics and what is called the Internet of Things. Devices like home thermostats, car starters, ovens and air conditioners will soon be connected to the internet and controlled with smartphones and tablets.

"All of these devices will have embedded electronics," Zozaya said.

The move to fast and less costly prototyping will lead to an increase in the number of startups in the hardware game rather than software and apps, he predicts.

"It is becoming much easier to prototype electronics," Zozaya said.

"Easier, cheaper, faster," Almeida added. "And the faster is where we want to set ourselves apart."